iPad Pro — making it magic

Ulti­mate­ly I end­ed up using a piece of Japan­ese man­ga soft­ware that has spec­tac­u­lar stroke sta­bi­liza­tion so I could use a sty­lus but get smooth vec­tor lines. Noth­ing on the ipad came close at the time. I bought it — used it for a few days and then because I had to get the col­or­ing book done, put it in a box for 5 months — on Octo­ber 1st — I took it out and have used it almost dai­ly since -

I know peo­ple who use it in place of a lap­top, but it real­ly depends on what you do on a dai­ly basis — If you do tons of file man­age­ment then it’s not great at that - but if you sketch and deal with cal­en­dars, emails etc. it’s excel­lent.

Hardware

Few things that I now know about the iPad Pro that are not crys­tal clear when I bought it

The Charg­er and cable they ship with aren’t USB-C — and it take a mil­lion years to charge on the pro­vid­ed charg­er and cable, the one you actu­al­ly want are sold sep­a­rate­ly by Apple here, the cable is here — they add anoth­er 100 bucks to the price, but you real­ly can’t do with­out them

The Apple Pen­cil charges from the firewire port on the iPad pro, mean­ing you can’t charge both at the same time — it charges rea­son­ably fast but while you have the rigid pen­cil stick­ing out of the ipad pro it’s SUPEREASY to bump it and poten­tial­ly break one or either — this giz­mo — makes charg­ing the pen­cil eas­i­er and safer

Software﻿

I real­ly only use three draw­ing apps on my iPad none are par­tic­u­lar­ly expen­sive

﻿Pro­cre­ate: my main tool, it’s love­ly to work in, took about 8 hours to get ful­ly accli­mat­ed, doe hi-rez art — all pix­el based

Sketch­es Plus: nice tools — but doesn’t do any­thing big­ger than screen­rez — pret­ty nice for some quick ideas though

﻿Con­cepts: — Odd but pow­er­ful vec­tor based draw­ing and draft­ing, can do any­thing but they kind of nick­el and dime you to unlock every­thing plus the learn­ing curve is sub­stan­tial­ly steep

Last­ly Adobe has a bunch of tools, but you need to be a cur­rent Cre­ative Cloud Sub­scriber to real­ly ben­e­fit from any of them — I’m no longer using their cur­rent soft­ware so I don’t use those tools — I’m sure they’re decent.

You’ll prob­a­bly want a way to car­ry your ipad around — I bought the apple smart cov­er with key­board because when I bought my iPad it was the best choice at the time — now there’s a ton of choic­es, assum­ing you don’t want a key­board I would prob­a­bly con­sid­er a padded pouch — The key­board is fine — I just tend to answer emails from my phone with my thumbs

If you have a use for it the iPad Pro- it’s a great tool, I love mine.